"Oh my god, why is this happening again?" I screamed, my voice cracking as I flung my gamepad at the console. It hit the floor with a dull clack that somehow felt like an insult from the game itself.

"What do they mean there are more than one Outer God?!" I shouted, pacing in tight circles in my cramped room. "And why the hell are the demons teaming up with them—and even the main character?!" My fingers dug into my hair. "He’s supposed to be the fated Hero King! He already reached Ex rank! He literally sacrificed most of the heroines just to save the world, and it still wasn’t enough!"

I collapsed onto my bed, staring at the ceiling like it owed me answers.

"I swear... I blame those demons," I muttered. "If they had just worked together properly from the start instead of messing around with Void creatures and those Outer Gods... maybe the world wouldn’t be collapsing in every timeline."

A slow sigh escaped me.

The game had a name.

Abyssal Chronos: Veil of Ruin.

It didn’t always sound so heavy.

When it first released, it was a simple fantasy-romance game—predictable routes, cheesy dialogue, the usual "save the kingdom, fall in love, live happily ever after" nonsense. But over time, updates changed everything. The tone shifted. The systems deepened. The world expanded in ways no one could fully map anymore.

It became something else entirely.

A so-called "all-in-one experience."

Combat that felt like watching cinematic wars unfold in real time. Branching timelines so complex that entire communities argued over whether free will even existed in-game. Hidden routes that required sacrifices, resets, and sometimes... complete emotional destruction just to unlock a single scene.

And then there were the heroines.

Not just romance options anymore.

Not just story pieces.

They became anchors of fate itself.

But the real problem wasn’t the difficulty.

It was the certainty of failure.

No matter how strong you became, no matter how many secret endings you uncovered, no matter how many timelines you brute-forced—

You always lost in the end.

Always.

I had gone further than most players ever dared.

I cleared the Seven Thrones of Hell, each ruler a nightmare-class existence that broke entire servers when they were first released. I watched kingdoms fall and rise across branching timelines. I even reached the confrontation against an actual Outer God—something most players only heard rumors about.

Some players never even got past the Titans—those monstrous servants chained beneath the Outer God’s will.

And yet I pushed further.

I saw everything.

And still, the truth stayed the same.

The Hero King survived.

But the world didn’t.

Because the Outer Gods always arrived anyway.

And worse... the system that was supposed to balance everything—the Fated Demon King, the narrative counterweight to the Hero King—was killed off early in Season One like he was nothing more than a tutorial boss.

The villainess of Volume Two? Erased from the story entirely.

No closure.

No explanation.

Just deletion.

After that... the world lost its spine.

No Demon King to oppose destiny.

No villainess to anchor the human conflicts.

Just a Hero King carrying a broken timeline toward an inevitable collapse.

And somewhere beyond all of it... the Outer Gods waited.

I exhaled slowly, rubbing my face.

"I swear this game hates me personally," I muttered.

Behind me, the console still glowed faint blue, humming softly. I hadn’t even noticed it was still running.

Abyssal Chronos: Veil of Ruin.

A game that had stopped feeling like a game a long time ago.

A system that didn’t just simulate a world—it insisted on correcting it.

I pushed myself up from the bed.

"Huh... whatever," I said quietly. "I’ve got work by eight. I’ll just quit. I’m done with this mess."

I stretched, joints cracking as I stood. My room was dim, cluttered, and far too quiet except for the faint electrical buzz coming from the extension socket near the wall. A cheap, overused thing I’d been meaning to replace for months.

I took one step forward.

And my foot caught the tangled wire on the floor.

"Wait—"

Time didn’t just slow.

It broke.

My body tilted forward in a useless, helpless motion. My arms reached out too late. Gravity finished what started as a mistake.

I fell headfirst into the extension socket.

There was a sharp, violent crack of electricity.

Light exploded behind my eyes.

Every nerve in my body ignited at once, as if I had been turned into a conduit for raw lightning. My vision shattered into white noise. My muscles locked so tightly I couldn’t even scream properly—just a fractured breath that got swallowed by the surge.

And then—

Silence.

Not darkness.

Not pain.

Silence.

Even thought itself seemed to freeze, like the world had forgotten how to continue me.

In that impossible stillness, something whispered from somewhere that wasn’t space.

Not a voice.

A presence.

"...chronos rejection detected..."

"...timeline fracture unstable..."

"...candidate resonance confirmed..."

The words weren’t meant for me. Or maybe they were, but my mind couldn’t hold them long enough to understand.

Then came the falling.

Not through air.

Not through space.

Through something deeper.

Through time that had lost its shape.

Through a system that was no longer just a game.

And as everything unraveled, my final thought drifted through the collapsing noise of existence:

Yeah... this game definitely hates me.

Then even that thought was gone.